Gas Pump, Hancock County GA 1998/Photo by Roy Burke
Doc had a soft spot for abandoned, rural gas pumps. We discussed the logistics of acquiring one and putting in the back yard at Ground Zero but things never quite lined up. He took many pictures of them, though, including this one in Hancock County, Georgia in 1998.
Lamar County GA Trumpet Honeysuckle March 23 2008 Roy Burke photo
Harold and I originally planned an overnight run to the Chattahoochee and Nantahala National Forests to trace some of Doc’s favorite county and Forest Service roads. But severe drought has brought forest fires, so we opted to run south and make a long day of it in Meriwether County, Pine Mountain, and Sprewell Bluff in nearby Upson County. We kept a road log, stopped at a rural church and graveyard, Flint River crossings, ate a road-food lunch beside a covered bridge, and sunned ourselves at FDR’s favorite picnic spot outside of Warm Springs at Dowdell’s Knob. We hiked the Delano trail for an hour, and made our way to Sprewell Bluff along the Flint, just in time to spend the golden hour. I took photos along the way and kept the log book. Harold drove his truck and developed our map strategy. We listened to a lot of Dwight Yoakam and talked of many things.
Just past dark, just past the Lamar County line on our way to dinner at the local meat and three in Barnesville and thence back to the city, on a rural stretch of State Road 36, we saw the brightest greenest closest meteorite either of us had seen in recent memory flash across the night sky like a coda, a cosmic boo-yah, as though Doc had cracked the time-space continuum and hurled a roman candle back at us, chuckling at our attempt to duplicate his fieldwork.
Dekalb Co Ga Rose first picture 1983, Roy Burke
Roy Burke got serious about his photography in 1983, took a class, and learned that art and its equipment with the same devotion and obsession he brought to music, fluid mechanics, wildflowers, watersheds and rural roads. Shooting film at his peak, Doctor Flowers would return from his annual Spring trip along the Eastern Blue Ridge with hundreds and hundreds of slides to go through. But everyone has to start somewhere, and the rose picture above, taken in Dekalb County in 1983, was digitally archived by him years later as Dekalb Co GA Rose first picture. He considered it his first ‘real’ photo. There were thousands more to come. The double exposure self portrait below was shot from the same roll of slide film.
Dekalb Co GA Doc Flowers double exposure 1983 Roy Burke
doctor flowers redux 